A Houston woman will find herself behind bars after putting a price tag on the wild. Savannah Nicole Valdez, 21, was sentenced to 15 months in the slammer for illegal wildlife trade, including peddling a spider monkey, in a breach of the Lacey Act, U.S. Attorney Alamdar S. Hamdani announced on Monday, based on a Department of Justice press release.
Valdez, who had already been on thin ice after a prior smuggling fracas and a wild car chase that ended in two years of supervised release, will now face the music with extra time – another month stacked onto her sentence after her earlier release got yanked for her recurring wildlife antics said the DOJ.
In a statement, Hamdani exclaimed, “When Savannah Valdez sold a Mexican spider monkey, she contributed to endangering a species," detailing the grim reality that those in this black market shoot monkey mothers to snatch their babies for sale, “As the court heard today, those who traffic in infant spider monkeys shoot the mothers first and then pull the infants from their mother’s dead bodies before throwing them into cages for transport. Valdez’s actions helped sustain an illicit market that encouraged the needless death and suffering of endangered animals. Thankfully, now she will have to spend time in a cage of her making - a prison cell.”
Last summer, a sting operation unmasked Valdez's Craigslist scheme where she hawked exotic birds including the majestic but endangered keel-billed toucans and yellow-headed Amazon parrots, all starting with ads that featured her very own contact digits, and when the time came to cash in, her mother and sister were the delivery couriers for the feathered goods, netting thousands of dollars, the DOJ press release detailed.
All trafficked animals have now been rehomed to Texas zoos.
